Land Surveyor vs Geomatics Engineer

Well, let's see.
You display land surveying as parenthetical to geomatics engineering.
As you are admittedly a student of the later, I would almost have to assume that you already have an opinion.
Will you share it, please?

Thanks,

Don

Don Blameuser, post: 326889, member: 30 wrote: Well, let's see.
You display land surveying as parenthetical to geomatics engineering.
As you are admittedly a student of the later, I would almost have to assume that you already have an opinion.
Will you share it, please?

Thanks,

Don

From what i can tell i dont see the difference and i would like to find out from the work environment if there is any difference or they can be used interchangeably?

I don't know what you are studying as a geomatics engineer so I can't compare it to land surveying.
Others here will probably be better suited to respond.
I'm sorry to have engaged you in such a sharp manner.
Just ignore me for the curmudgeon I am.
🙂
I've gotten used to it.

Don

A Geomatics Engineer is someone who has studied related subjects in school, and perhaps obtained a degree with that title.

A Land Surveyor is someone who has passed licensing tests, obtained the required experience, and is licensed by their jurisdiction to practice boundary surveying.

The term Geomatics gained popularity in American academia in the mid 1990s primarily because they felt that "land surveying" didn't sound sufficiently high-tech, high-earning, or exciting to high school kids. The reason most of the schools were struggling to maintain good enrollment numbers was almost universally blamed on the dull-sounding profession of "land surveying". The "Engineering" part of the name is all about ABET accreditation. IMO, ABET has a long and continuing history of trying to minimize the surveying education and turning all survey education into a sub-branch of civil engineering. It is and always has been an organization of academicians with engineering degrees who have never known what to do with surveying. ABET is why you're more likely to have a professor with a doctoral degree but less than two years of actual surveying experience (more likely scanning the face of a glacier in Tibet or Nepal than looking for property corner monuments in Tennessee or Nevada) than you are a licensed practicing surveyor with 20 or more years experience in the type of surveying most graduates are likely to be involved with.

A GE degree program, as opposed to a LS degree program (of which I'm not sure any remain) will have more engineering course requirements, and therefore less time in the program that could be devoted to survey (mostly boundary) related topics. You will likely spend more time writing programs in the latest whiz-bang programming language suited for mathematically manipulating numerical databases and creating really spiffy user interfaces to solve engineering and surveying related problems than actually learning survey related topics or time learning to apply surveying principles in the field - then you will graduate and never write another program again (aside from perhaps a few spreadsheet applications) because, unless you go to work for a software company, no employer wants you to spend several tens of thousands of $ worth of billable time to attempt to create a program that does the same things that they can buy commercially for $2000 or $3000 and get some training to go with it.

As a GE student, you'll probably get about the same amount of training using commercially available programs as the LS student would, you'll probably have the same amount of math and pure science, and have similar other general education requirements. Upon graduation, as a geomatic engineer, you will probably be better prepared for very large construction projects, or jobs where there is a lot of data to manipulate to be used for engineering design or to take from design to construction. You will be less prepared for effective fieldwork, boundary field investigation, and application of boundary principles. As a graduate of either type of program, if you were to obtain initial employment in an organization where the education of the other program may have given you better advantage, as long as you continue to learn on the job and on your own time, after about 5 years, it won't make any difference what your degree certificate says you graduated as.

At this point in time, there is no license for a Geomatic Engineer, and there is no such thing as the practice of Geomatic Engineering except in the marketing sensibilities and imaginations of academia. Just keep in mind that you're learning to be a surveyor with some extra training in engineering, that the best skill you will take with you from college is having learned how to study, and that the learning should never stop as long as you continue to practice, and you will do very well with either a Geo Eng degree or an LS degree.

Wow, did the replies to tis thread get trimmed out or what?

I'm going with bill's response. Land Surveyors will deal with property line location and interpretation of deeds in order to place them on the ground. Geomatic Engineers are without a doubt great measurers, and can understand geodesy in a way I'll never understand, but I bet they couldn't place a bounding deed! 🙂

Don,

There's a parallel thread in "General Land Surveying". I think that's where you'll find the replies you expected to see.

eapls2708, post: 327101, member: 589 wrote: Don,

There's a parallel thread in "General Land Surveying". I think that's where you'll find the replies you expected to see.

Thanks for that heads up!

Did anyone just think to look up the word?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomatics&apos ;">Geomatics page from Wikipedia

Eric, from that article, I gather that a "Geomatics Engineer" is an expert measurer with a degree.

imaudigger, post: 327669, member: 7286 wrote: Eric, from that article, I gather that a "Geomatics Engineer" is an expert measurer with a degree.

Well, I looked at it more that it was a "spatial reference" about measuring. i.e. satellites, lat/lon et al.
Not so much worried about boundaries or datums and such or the tedium about whose fence is across the line and stuff.
I don't care about [educational] degrees.

It is very confusing. Engineering, is based on design, or inventing complex products. Land Surveying is not really "engineering" at all from my experience. I would relate land surveying to be more parallel with science and/or legal experts in land matters. Measuring is a tool used, and being an expert measurer is definitely a function to do all the rest.

As said earlier, Geomatic Engineering is a term that was designed to try to make the land surveyor sound more important. Most of the people not in the field of surveying think that land surveyors are just measurers, and the profession has been trying to shake that perception for a long time.

From my personal experience..

Any engineer or planner might be able to draw a survey accurately locating structures on a property, maybe even to a higher degree of accuracy given the correct tools and experience.

Only a land surveyor however can show how far those structures are from legal property lines, as Land Surveying is about accuracy, but it is also highly reliant on following the footsteps of those that have gone before. Just because a new piece of paper says a boundary line is "xx.xx feet" does not mean it actually is! A land surveyor is more like an engineer with a legal degree.

As far as geomatics and it just being a renaming of land surveying, that may be true but I am not sure.